Day of Doom: The Complete Battles of Gordon Manning & The Griffin, Volume 2 (8 page)

“I’m trespassing on your province, perhaps,” he went on, “but this is beyond me. It baffles me. I have thought of a snake, or some poisonous creature, but what beast, bird or reptile has fangs that can strike deep and straight on any one’s chest? A serpent must have something within the compass of its jaws to send in its fangs. Even then they are curved, their path is not direct. Neither of them bled. This girl’s blood is jellied, the blood vessels are distended.

“Her husband tells, or tried to tell, a weird tale. But he was shocked, incoherent. I gave him a mild sedative. He was talking nightmares.

“I’ll leave it to you, Manning, and I trust you find a solution. I may have word for you, after the autopsies.”

Manning had made no comment, even when he bade Henley good-by. He searched the room, knowing it had been covered. He looked at the undisturbed flower bed, surveyed the nearest building, two hundred feet away, went out on the terrace and returned.

There was nothing. Only the two bodies, one swollen to the shape of a filled wineskin, the other shrunk like a corpse made ready for the injection of mummifying fluids.

“Where’s this maid, and where’s Mr. Power?” he asked.

“The maid’s in her room. She’s the only servant sleeps here. The cook comes later. And the girl’s scared stiff. I don’t think she knows a thing. I’m not so sure about him. No doubt the doc knew what he was doing, but I’d have let him talk. But Henley said he’d come out of it soon. ’Twas an hour ago he gave him the dose,” Doherty said.

Manning saw the maid first. It was obvious the girl knew little of the actual tragedy, but she gave enlightening information. Manning asked her to make some strong coffee for her master, and took it in to him himself.

Power was in one of the rooms of the suite. Manning looked at him before he wakened him. The man’s face was good-looking but weak, the face of a spoiled boy, not quite grown up. It was haggard with what might be worry, but was certainly part dissipation. He jumped like a landed trout, twitching, when Manning roused him.

“Who are you?” he asked. “Another cop? Who doped me? Why in hell don’t you
do
something? Evelyn? Where is she? They haven’t—taken her away?”

“You get a grip on yourself and drink this coffee,” said Manning. “They had you listed on the All-American team once, Power, didn’t they? Then you know how to buck up. If you want us to do something, pull yourself together. My name’s Manning. I’m not exactly a cop….”

“Manning? The chap who got the Griffin? Then….”

Power sat up, drank the hot coffee. He gulped at it a bit convulsively and Manning could see the pulses throb in wrists and neck. But he got himself under control.

“I’ll talk to you, Manning. The doctor thought I was crazy and the sergeant thought I was lying. I don’t blame either of them. I’m not so sure I’m sane myself. I was out all last night, drinking. I suppose May, that’s the maid, told you that.”

Manning nodded.

“She said you’d been out several times lately, alone. Also that you quarreled with your wife each time before you did go out. You’ve been played up in the gabby columns, lately, Power. It’s hinted that you’re more or less of a playboy who has come to the end of his rope. I’m telling you this because I want you to understand you don’t have to talk without advice of counsel.”

“You think I killed my wife?” asked Power. His nerves were twitching, though he was clearly trying to steady himself.

“I have an open mind, Power,” said Manning. “I am an investigator, not a prosecutor, nor a persecutor. You don’t have to say anything unless you want to. I won’t advise you. It may entangle you and yet not incriminate you. I am out to get the guilty and also to protect an innocent man. You are not in a good position and you may improve it. We know that you have become estranged from your wife, that you have frequently quarreled with her, that she has threatened to leave you, and that you had a violent scene before you went out last night.”

“The maid again!” said Power bitterly. “All right, I admit all that. I’ll take the blame for the estrangement, if you like, but I’ll talk about what happened after I came home, a little before four this morning. I had been drinking, but I was not drunk. If I had been, what I saw would sober any man.”

He covered his face with his hands and shuddered. Manning let him recover himself. Power gulped more coffee.

“If I don’t tell it to some one who’ll listen without showing he thinks I’m crazy, I’ll go haywire in earnest. It sounds incredible. I believe, if I thought much more about it, I’d think I had dreamed it in some frightful nightmare, except for Evelyn. It was monstrous.”

“I’ve traveled a lot, Power,” Manning said quietly. “I have seen too many strange and monstrous things in Africa, in India, to be a sceptic.”

“You’ve been in India? Then… never mind!”

IV

Power showed a swift and tremendous excitement. His eyes flamed and then the light went out of them.

“We had been sleeping in separate rooms lately,” he went on. “At her request. She—Evelyn—had changed greatly. She used to like society, sports, the theater. She gave them up. She seemed to retire into herself entirely. I have seen her at times when she almost seemed to be in a trance. She disliked to have me even touch her.

“She shrank from me—as if some influence walled her off from me. I’ve got plenty of weaknesses, but I’m not a rotter. I’ve tried to patch things up, to bring them back to where we started. But she looked at me now and then as if she hated me.

“Last night, this morning rather, somewhere around four, I came home. I had been to a card club. I had been thinking things over. I wanted a showdown, either to make up with Evelyn, or call it all off. I was willing to make promises, even confessions, to try to win her back. You see, I still loved her.

“I knew she didn’t sleep very much, never very heavily. I didn’t want to put off the attempt. I was despondent. I have lost a great deal of money, my own and a lot of Evelyn’s, the same as a great many other people have. Gambling, in Wall Street. Not losses at cards. And I thought, if Evelyn refused, that the only thing for me to do was to make away with myself. When we married, we each took out a policy for two hundred thousand dollars in the other’s favor.”

Manning stroked his lean jaw. Power did not see that he was establishing motive for his killing his wife. Two hundred thousand dollars meant a lot to a man who was practically ruined.

“The premiums were fully paid,” Power went on. “My contract winnings paid them. It seemed the only honorable thing to do. A bit morbid, perhaps, to you, but here was a total loss ahead, all ways, if I couldn’t get through to Evelyn, get her back.”

“I can understand it,” said Manning. “Go on.”

“I let myself in,” said Power. “The door of her room—formerly a guest room—was not locked. It was the first time I had intruded on her privacy, but I had to get it over with, one way or the other.

“It was dark. She never used a night light. The window was wide open. I saw the stars shining back of the buildings across the road. I saw the curtains waving in a little wind and then—my God—I saw….

“God or the devil knows
what
I saw, Manning. It was a shape, and it seemed to be crouching. It was furry and spotted, like a leopard in its mottling. Like nothing I knew of in shape. And it stank. It stank horribly, acrid, foul! It was on Evelyn’s breast. It had clawed aside the coverings. It was quiet, hideously intent. I thought she had swooned at sight of the horror.

“Then it heard me. It rose, hideous, dreadful. It turned its head toward me. Manning, I saw eyes, not two, but many eyes, there might have been six, perhaps a dozen. I could not tell. I was gripped with some sort of paralysis. The thing reared, the eyes glared crimson and the stench was terrible, ammoniac, blinding, choking. And those eyes! They shifted from crimson to purple, to green, and then I snapped out of it and groped for the switch. I found it. The lamps in her room were all shaded, but I saw the monster leap as if the light scared it. It sprang for the window, through it, without a sound, like some enormous bullet.”

Manning had already noticed a persistence of the stench Power had mentioned, when he had looked at the body. It had been vaguely familiar to him at the time. He had hastily connected it with disinfectants Henley might have used. Now he knew it had been something else. Weird as it sounded, he believed much, at least, of Power’s story. Power lacked the imagination and the dramatic quality to have evolved and acted out a fantasy of that amazing type.

“I let the thing go—how could I stop it? My first thought then was for Evelyn. I saw it against the sky, blurred, furry, blotched, and then it was gone.

“And Evelyn was dead. Manning, you’ve been in Paris? You’ve seen those optical delusions they show you on Montmartre, where the body of a beautiful girl changes before your eyes into a decomposing corpse. Imagine then! Before my eyes Evelyn was swelling hideously, changing color. She was mottled like the Thing. Her face lost all features. And I—I lost my sanity. I don’t know if I’ve got it back,” Power ended wearily. “I only know that she was killed horribly, perhaps before my eyes.

“That terrace garden of ours is private and inclosed. When I reached it, with my gun, there was no trace of the Thing. Not a leaf seemed disturbed. There are no fire escapes. The walls are sheer, up and down. And they were vacant. The Thing had vanished utterly. And my wife lay inside—a revolting sight, even to me, who loved her. I called our doctor with what reason I had left. You know the rest.”

“Not all of it,” said Manning. “But I hope to. Power, I found this underneath one of your wife’s pillows. Do you know anything about it?”

Power stared blankly at the object, an image of brass, female, which had been engraved by hand on the original casting. He shook his head.

“I never saw it before. What is it? Some sort of mascot? It’s ugly enough.”

“It is an image of Parvati, the wife of Siva the Destroyer, one of the Hindu trinity of Brahma, Vishnu and Siva. Hindu workmanship, unquestionably.”

“Hindu? She might have got it from this chap Zerah, who has the penthouse on the roof. He is a swami or a yogi, some sort of mystic or fakir, I suppose. Evelyn and some of her pals used to go to see him, formed some sort of mysterious cult or other. I don’t know much about it. Crystal gazing or fortune telling. It was a kind of fad.”

Manning said no more, but put the little image in his pocket. There was no use in telling Power that the Thugs of India robbed and ravished in the name of Parvati, that the Tantrists indulged in wild orgies in her foul honor.

“How big did this Thing seem?” he asked.

“How can I tell? There was a mass, like some crouching body, mottled and furry but not too distinct. It was not less than the size of my head. Then, as I told you, it rose, it swelled, it stunk. There were the eyes! The eyes!”

Manning left Power, with Doherty in charge.

“Don’t harry him,” he said to the sergeant. “I don’t want him to feel he’s a prisoner. He’s been through hell.”

“Yeah,” said Doherty stolidly. “I wouldn’t wonder. You’re a big shot in our game, Mr. Manning, but I can’t swallow all that hooey about what he calls the Thing. It ain’t human, leastwise I mean it ain’t natural, or reasonable.”

“Ah!” said Manning. “ ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio.’ I’ll be back presently. I want to find out a few things about Pelota, and then I’m going to pay a visit to Zerah, the Hindu gentleman who lives in the penthouse. Just one thing, Doherty. I want you to come into that bedroom for a minute. Hanlon can keep tabs on Power and the maid, also the cook when she shows up.”

V

They stood in the death chamber. Manning closed the windows where the Thing had disappeared.

“Got a good nose, Doherty?” he asked.

“Not bad. Why?”

“Smell anything unusual? A little like ammonia? It’s faint, but I can still detect it.”

Doherty enlarged his naturally wide nostrils.

“I noticed that before,” he said. “Thought it was disinfectant the doc used.”

“So did I,” agreed Manning. “Try again, with me.”

Doherty sniffed deeply.

“Smells to me like ants,” he said. “We had a plague of ’em once, me and the missis, in our little shack on Long Island. They used to swarm in the house and the old lady found a nest. Poured boiling water on it. Killed ’em. But they gave off a smell like this one.”

“Ants! Formic acid! Doherty, you’ve given me a lead. It needs disentangling, but it looks promising. And I won’t forget you if it works out.”

“You don’t mean ants had anything to do with this affair?” asked the bewildered sergeant.

“No. Not at all. Not ants. But the smell, the blistering effect. I’m still groping in the dark, Doherty, but you’ve shown me a glimmer. Now go back and take care of Power and the others.”

Manning was gone, his eyes gleaming. Doherty regarded the closed door confusedly.

“I’d like to know what I tipped him off to,” he muttered to himself. “But he’s beyond me. And why did he call me Horatio when my name’s Patrick Aloysius?”

Manning got off on the top floor. The penthouse had its own automatic elevator for the last flight. But this was where Pelota had his studio, where he painted the flattering portraits of the society women. Pelota whose death seemed due to the same mysterious cause, if Henley’s theory was right—twin punctures, driven straight in through the thicker parts of torsos. And the smell of ants.

A woman opened the studio door narrowly, was disposed to close it in an unfamiliar face, but Manning set his foot across the threshold, flashed a small golden badge.

“Police,” he said. “Let me in.” Then, as the woman’s stolid face remained antagonistic, he repeated his words in Italian.

She widened the door, resentfully.

“The maestro is dead,” she said in her own tongue. “They have taken him away. I know nothing. I was not here last night. I clean the studio. I cook also two meals. That is all.”

“Perhaps,” said Manning. “Have no fear.”

The great studio had a high ceiling, a big north window. Its entrance door was close to the one that opened on the terrace. There was no communication from the studio, possibly because of special building changes for the artist’s working convenience. But it would have been simple for Pelota to go to the terrace at any hour. Why he had chosen to do so, before dawn, in pyjamas and robe, was still an enigma. Painters did eccentric things, of course, Manning considered.